Kathleen Stock: Right on Gender, Wrong on Board Games

Kathleen Stock’s recent Unherd essay, Are You a Board Game Loser ? Real Life Is Leaving You Behind, was published at Quillette in 2019 .

The author of the piece, Kathleen Stock , has staked out a prominent role in the fight to (as she puts it on Substack ) “claw feminism back from the idiots [who] ruined it”.

The New Yorker recently ran a hopelessly pretentious article under the headline, The Personal, Political Art of Board-Game Design .

The author had no evident expertise in board gaming, but was primarily interested in profiling a transgender game designer whose creative themes focus on—and these are the designer’s own words—“queer rage and shitposting”.

"Euros" have come to dominate the hobby over the last few decades because their innovative game mechanics are directed at creation rather than combat.

In the popular Euro Terraforming Mars , for instance, players compete to build up their corporate empires on the Red Planet .

Casual players (women, in particular, tend to prefer games that can be wrapped up inside an hour .